Making Peace with a Gun to Your Head

The Palestinian "information minister" was on The Daily Show this evening. He talked about peace and trying to build a nation, and the UN report, but he said something that really irked me. To paraphrase, he said that Israel has been a tough-talker for 60 years, and that peace was attainable if they were willing to really work for it.

REALLY WORK FOR IT?

In case the world forgot, which they seem to have done, the Israelis tried to make peace starting in Madrid and Oslo in the early 90's with the Palestinians. Since around that time, there have been two Intifadas led by Palestinians, aimed at the murder of thousands of innocent, helpless Israeli citizens. When I say helpless, I mean people in pizza parlors and discos on Saturday nights, people being killed at sites holy to both Jews and Muslims. Each time an agreement has been reached, in which Israel has given up territory and at times money, the result has been a Khruschevian violent sedge for even more land and more power.

In 1948, when BRITAIN decided to relinquish its rights to the land then known as "Palestine", the borders were carefully drawn to ensure that land occupied by mostly nomadic and Bedouin peoples (who later nationalized as "Palestinians") was not inflicted upon any more than the land on which the Zionists were residing. When the United Nations ratified this plan, the Jewish residents, (who had been living in many of these areas since the early part of the century), welcomed the plan. Nonetheless, on that day, Israel was brutally attacked by every one of its neighbors. The plan should have worked in principle, even the contested city, Jerusalem, was made an international city:

Photo from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UN_Partition_Plan_For_Palestine_1947.png

Apparently this was not nearly good enough. Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia all attacked from the north and east, while Egypt acted through the Sinai on the east. With international support, Israel survived.

The Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank have demanded a lot of things that they have yet to earn. Israel gives back land, they want more. Israel withdraws troops, the free Palestinian people elect an internationally recognized terrorist group to run their government. Israel builds a last ditch effort wall to try and at least keep their people safe, Palestinians object on grounds of access but are still caught trying to transport bombs out of Gaza and the West Bank and into Israel. Peace cannot be attained this way.

Take this an example. The United States cedes Texas back to its people as an independent state after years of non-violent protests and pleas to the US government and international community. The first thing Texans do is elect a government that pledges to destroy the United States and people begin walking into adjacent states with explosives to kill people and while a minority of Texans are doing this, a majority of people, along with their government support the actions of these maniacs. Do you think the US government would be concerned at this point about the plight of the Texan people, or do you think it would do anything necessary to keep its country and people safe from danger?

The difference in this case is that the Israelis pulling out of the West Bank and Gaza a few years ago was not a concession, it was an appeasement tactic, to try to end the violence. I'm not denying that innocent women and children in the West Bank and Gaza are killed, and that that is horrible as well, I am simply looking at the facts: every military insurrection into these areas by Israeli troops have been resultant of a Palestinian attack on unarmed Israelis. How can Palestinians make acts of war and ask for peace at the same time without believing someone will notice? Israelis and Palestinians both want peace for the sake of peace. With this assumption, one must admit that terror attacks on innocent civilians does not raise ones bargaining chip. A true desire for peace and sovereignty is shown by peaceful and sovereign acts, such as using money for domestic infrastructure instead of bombs.

In a perfect world, Palestinians and Israelis would live side by side, would even be friends. We don't like in a perfect world, and until the Palestinian people end their murder sprees and decide to become a people interested in peace and equality (check out their record on women and civil rights), a coexistent world is a fallacy composed only of pure fantasy.